Streaming
By Will Eno
This week, we're happy to share Will Eno's meditation on fatherhood, playwriting, and contentment. The piece was previously published in our print Almanac in 2024.
IF YOU’RE LIKE ME, your name is Will Eno and you can't get over the cost of digital streaming services and you were born in Lowell, Massachusetts to a mom who was reportedly a wonderful aunt and a dad who seemed like an alcoholic but didn't drink and you were a class clown when you were little and then kind of shut down emotionally and started bicycle racing and graduated high school early and lived at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado and raced semi-pro in Italy and got picked up hitchhiking on some European Tuesday in Germany by a supermodel named Lauren who offered you a job as kind of a Guy Friday doing errands and that got you to New York City where you fell in love with a woman from Alabama who was a writer and you got to know her editor and teacher Gordon, who really changed your life, but didn't change it so much that you suddenly didn't have to work, so you continued doing different things that people pay for, like construction and house painting and cold-calling for a small but highly disreputable brokerage firm and then you got work proofreading psychology text books and that's where you learned how to spell "Phineas Gage" and learned that if a railroad spike gets blasted through your skull into your brain and destroys your prefrontal cortex it will definitely have an effect on your mood, either right then or definitely down the road, and you were on your way to the proofreading job when the Twin Towers were attacked and you watched from the riverside in Brooklyn and saw them both fall, however many minutes apart, and you always remember how there was no noise at all, they just fell, all that blue sky behind them, like a glacier calving on a nature show with the sound off, but it was buildings with people in them, and you're not sure how we went on from that but it seems that for the most part we did, and years went by, and then some more, and you were writing plays and at first they mainly got done in London, which is so far away from Lowell, and one of them was a finalist for the Pulitzer and that opened some doors and some trapdoors and you also wrote a play that was about among other things family members being replaced and transformed and about honest to goodness transcendence and it won a lot of awards and is playing right now in Bucharest but nowhere else and you got married and one thing led to another which surprisingly led back to that first thing and then your father died but exactly 24 hours later your daughter was born at 6:03 PM and from that minute on, your life has been better and more real and meaningful, and you and your wife are separated but it's amicable and you both agree on who the most wonderful and surprising person in the world is, and you and your daughter are always doing things like camping, riding bikes, eating sardines, fighting about brushing hair, making brownies for your neighbor Edith who just turned 101, and watching the very latest animated stuff on TV, and sometimes around dinnertime you play Restaurant and how it works is your daughter writes the order, which is usually tacos, on a slip of paper, and you have a binder clip you use to clip it to the oven hood and then when you're done making the food, you yank the order down like a short-order cook and say "spike it," and your daughter, who really likes this part, impales the slip of paper onto a pencil thing you made that's just like that metal spike they have in professional kitchens like on The Bear, which is on Hulu, and you give each other a "this was a good day's work" look and it truly was and the days go by like dreams and you don't have any money because you blew it all on necessities and you’re a playwright and you owe more money than you've ever made but they are often, the days, practically always, filled with this wonderful, difficult, healing feeling you hope won't go away and are surprised ever showed up in the first place, because you can't believe the bounty and excess and the goddamned priceless, unstreamable, unrepeatable joy of this one, sole existence that started back in Lowell and now features this miraculous person who reminds you every day of the miracle of almost all things and all people, and you look at your monthly streaming charges and think, When did I sign up for Epix Now and what even is it, same question with Crunchyroll, and how on Earth is somebody even remotely like me supposed to afford all this, and you look around your little apartment at the drawing of a heart your daughter did on the wall, at the map she made to the store around the corner which is 268 steps away, at your mother's ashes sitting on a shelf beside an actual meteorite, some dusty trophies, a thing made of cardboard and sequins, and a little ceramic lamb, and you hope you will have enough time to absorb and enjoy all the entertainment and information and beauty that the present day has to offer you. And you ask God or the ceiling or anyone for continued blessings on your little household and it's so amazing how peacefully and silently a little kid can sometimes sleep and you try to fall asleep yourself saying that word they say all the time these days, content, but with the accent on the last syllable.
Will Eno lives in Brooklyn and is the happy, proud father of eleven-year-old Albertine, who acted in a workshop of her dad’s new play at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, this summer. Will is a Pulitzer Finalist in Drama and winner of the Obie, Lortel, and Drama Desk awards.